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http://www.nimh.nih.gov/
publicat/ocd.cfm
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
documents/disk0/00/00/11/47/
cog00001147-00/ocd-final.htm
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Customer Centricity
Ethics
Telecom 101 |
Anticipatory-Avoidance
Learning
- "I say, I say, I say! Why
have you got a banana in your ear?"
- "To keep the elephants
away."
- "But there aren't any elephants
for miles."
- "I know — effective, isn't
it?"
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The above silly example illustrates the tenacity of learning
in which the pay-off ("reinforcement" in behaviorist
language) is that something does not happen. This is
prophylactic, preventative behavior, and no-one with any sense
is going to abandon such learned behavior just to see whether
something terrible really does happen. |
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It is thus at the root of the learned component of obsessive-compulsive
behavior (although there is evidence for a genetic basis for
predisposition to that disorder), of superstition, and of people's
devotion to practices which allegedly preserve health ("Don't
go out immediately after you have washed your hair — you'll
catch cold"). It may also underlie the potency of some
kinds of necessarily unverifiable religious belief. The origin of such learning has often been
authoritative
injunctions from parents or others, but it is their anticipatory-avoidance
nature — their perceived contribution to survival — which keeps
them in being. Such learning is notoriously
resistant
to change.
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The classic demonstration was an experiment
by
Solomon and
Wynne (1953), bearing a resemblance to
Seligman's
protocol. Dogs were confined to a cage, of which half the floor
could be electrified to give a shock: they were free to jump
over a low net to the other side. A buzzer was sounded just
before the shock, and the dogs rapidly learned to jump at the
sound of the buzzer. The shocks themselves were discontinued,
but the dogs continued to jump. Normally such conditioning would
eventually have been extinguished by the removal of the
unconditioned
stimulus but not in this case: an informal account would
say that the dogs had too much sense to wait around to find
out if the shock was going to happen or not.
Original content updated and hosted at
www.learningandteaching.info/learning/
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